The King's Touch, by Dr Stephen Brogan: 3 September 2022

 

The Lit. Soc. broke new ground, drilling down on the specialist literature of the distant past when Dr. Stephen Brogan presented his study of Adenochoiradelogia, the 1684 text on the presentation and treatment of scrofula with particular reference to the application of the King’s Touch. The enigmatic title stands firmly in a tradition of medical neologism drawn from the Classical languages and is a three volume anatomick-chirurgical treatise on glands and swellings which explains their nature, describes the clinical presentation and discusses the therapeutic efficacy of contemporary treatments. For both speaker and audience, attention was centred on a specific treatment, the Charisma Basilikon or Royal Touch. The author, one of King Charles II’s surgeons, Thomas Browne, had a ringside seat at the application of the Royal Touch. Scrofula would now be technically described as tuberculous cervical adenitis i.e., the spread of tuberculosis to the lymph glands in the neck, with Dr Brogan attributing the infection to the ingestion of unpasteurised milk from cows with TB. The affected glands could present as swellings which increased in size and became red and tender before sometimes rupturing to form a sinus, a tract from the abscess cavity which opened onto the skin surface and along which pus was intermittently discharged. Nowadays an uncommon clinical condition to encounter but our speaker gave some insight into the medical challenge it posed with a display of 19 th century photographs and watercolours of afflicted patients.

Dr. Brogan emphasised the importance of context in considering illness and healing in the 17th century. Disease was then considered providential, sited at an intersection of religion, health and medicine; a philosophy which may explain the wide spectrum of healers on offer – physicians, apothecaries, barber-surgeons, cunning men, diet advocates and lifestyle coaches.

Tactile healing was not an exclusively royal preserve and the Irish 

J.P., Valentine Greatrakes,attracted thousands of supplicants following his arrival in London in 1665. The busiest monarchical adept of the King’s Touch was Charles II whose production line of medical ministrations followed a seasonal calendar of Easter and Michaelmas, the latter coinciding with harvest time. During these 10-day seasons, the Merry Monarch touched 300 sufferers each morning and the events were trailed with advertisements in The London Gazette. Before participating in one of these sessions, the patient required a referral letter from his vicar confirming the scrofula diagnosis with the vicar being obliged to record the names of those he had referred. To attend the actual ceremony the patient had to collect an admission token from the surgeon’s house beforehand and we can only speculate at the febrile atmosphere which must have prevailed there from the diarist John Evelyn's description of seven deaths in the crush at one surgeon’s door. Lest we imagine that those submitting to the cure were drawn from a gullible underclass, aristocrats also underwent the process although they could avoid the frenzied scramble to acquire an admission token, being favoured with a domiciliary visit and personal delivery. The surprisingly modern bureaucracy which attended presenting yourself for the Touch was inspired by the contemporary fear of masterless men roaming the countryside and possibly, horror of horrors, becoming a charge on the Poor Law although two thirds of victims were actually women. The ceremonial choreography was thoughtfully arranged; the venue was the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, in front of which the King’s father had been executed by Cromwell’s regicidal republicans in 1649. Father and son shared a belief in the Divine Right of Kings, hankered after a French-style absolute monarchy and saw the ruler as the Lord’s Anointed, leaving only a small step to crediting him with supernatural powers; so, dispensing the Charisma Basilikon was a political endeavour for the Stuarts. Charles also took the religious element seriously as well, topping up the royal reservoir of spirituality by taking Communion beforehand and having prayers from St. John’s Gospel intoned throughout with the inspiration for the whole ceremony drawn from St. Mark: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. St. Mark 16, v.18 (KJV) The king duly laid his hands on the lesions for 15 – 20 seconds. At a second phase of the ceremony the patient was given a gold coin known as an Angel, to be worn from a ribbon round the neck, which contained more of the royal metal, gold, than any other coin in circulation at that time. Nowadays one can fetch anything from £1,000 to £4,000 on eBay. On one face there was a depiction of St.Michael the Archangel killing a wyvern, representing the triumph of good over evil and by extension health over disease, while the obverse showed a ship at full sail coming towards the viewer, signifying a healthy body politic following the true course. The coin’s rubric read "Soli Dei Gloria" – The Glory of God

Alone. Charles II took Touching seriously and is estimated to have touched 100,000 people in his lifetime, probably seeing it as a conservative reaction to the regicide Republic/Commonwealth and the political malaise he felt accompanied it. Browne’s text reports a 75 patient case series, 5 of whom were healed within 2 to 3 days and another 30 improved over 4 to 6 weeks. As in modern medicine, managing expectations was important. Many sufferers were not expecting an overnight cure but wished to be heard on the subject of their misfortune and were prepared to settle for even a slow, incremental improvement. Evidence for a political dimension comes from the refusal of the Calvinist William III or the House of Hanover to continue the practice despite its revival under Queen Anne and its impressive historical lineage, dating back to Edward the Confessor.

As ever, the Lit. Soc. audience rose to the challenge of novelty, firing in a series of intelligent questions in the Q & A.

William Doherty

The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by William Doherty

 The literary dictatorship to which Book Group members voluntarily submit can sometimes corral them onto strange, previously unexplored pastures which they vow to try.  Last month my group chose to eschew the avant-garde, the English Classics and those watershed texts which signposted major changes in the tastes of the reading public, in favour of the well-trodden path of American crime fiction.  Strictly speaking, James Lee Burke’s The Glass Rainbow did not qualify as "pastures new" for me as I had previously read at least a dozen of Burke’s works. Treating this as an exercise in Critical Reading gave me the chance to view this novel with fresh eyes.

The narrative structure follows a conventional third person path, albeit leavened with copious passages of earthy, direct speech.  The central character, Dave Robicheaux, has featured in 17 earlier novels which have a contemporary, American setting.  After a varied working life in law enforcement, he is now a mature deputy sheriff in New Iberia in South-West Louisiana.  Place is critical in shaping the cultural contours of these stories.  The town lies near Bayou Teche, a 135 mile stretch of water which was once the course of the Mississippi before the river opted to turn sharp left then right and empty into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, thereby creating a setting that even unfettered geography has elected to avoid.  The town sits in the administrative subdivision (parish) of Acadia which reinforces the distinctive ethnic framing of Robicheaux as a Cajun, a group with their own unique cultural, linguistic, musical and gastronomic heritage. Acadie was a 17th century French colony in what are now the Atlantic Provinces of Canada and was named after the Peloponnesian region which became a mythological symbol of an idealised pastoral wilderness.  The Yin and the Yang of 18th century European wars saw them becoming British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and then being largely ignored until their expulsion in the 1750s as the British laid the groundwork for their conquest of France’s St. Lawrence-based North American settler colony.  Scattered along America’s Atlantic seaboard, thousands of these Acadiens made their way to the French colony of Louisiana and settled on its Gulf coast. The transformative, corrupting power of speech has turned them into Cajuns.  Their precipitous flight from Nova Scotia meant few arrived in the slave colony of Louisiana with the capital to enter the dominant plantation economy and they were destined to join the ranks of the poor whites.  The Louisiana Purchase saw the huge nominally French Mississippi - based colony of Louisiana sold by Napoleonic France to the USA in 1803.  The Cajuns were further scarred by the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War which pitched their state into a military occupation, the aborted Reconstruction project, murderous racial strife (the Colfax Massacre), the Jim Crow laws and 150 years as one of the poorest states in the Union.  Our hero draws on this emotive backdrop, making reference to historical incidents, and Burke exploits the unsettling topography and climatic conditions to inject disruptive dramatic notes into the narrative melody.  Water courses move slowly through swamp, harbouring alligators and deadly cottonmouth snakes, and fashion the distinctive landscape of bayous, levees and coulées with the whole intermittently transformed by violent thunderstorms suddenly sweeping in from the Gulf.  The sense of place is more powerful than Morse’s Oxford or Taggart’s Glasgow and is consciously introduced as a pillar to support the narrative. 

Robicheaux, tuned in to all these nuances, is a sure-footed traveller through this landscape, driven by a strong, if understated, moral imperative; he is aware of, but immune to, racial and social distinctions and has an innate ability to spot a delinquent, even those fêted by wider society.  His ancestry frees him from guilt as either an engineer or beneficiary of the racialised social structure of Louisiana.  Flawed like so many modern heroes, he is a recovering alcoholic, a Vietnam vet. subject to post-traumatic stress disorder, taking the form of wartime flashbacks, and a protective family man, a role which can morph into a vulnerability when the family becomes a target.  The partner is often a necessary adjunct in serial detective novels and Clete Purcel adds further ethnic colour to the novel’s cast.  He is descended from the Irish “navvies” brought to dig New Orleans'  Basin Canal in the 19th century and combines alcohol addiction with an explosive irascibility but like Robicheaux at bottom has a strong moral core.  The duo’s outspoken natures and willingness to verbally engage with the rogues’ gallery in the plot results in vivid, lengthy passages of dialogue whose sexual, anatomical inventiveness might draw plaudits in the changing room of a University Rugby team but might dissuade more fastidious readers from engaging further with the story.  Setting a story in the Deep South always gives an author licence to draw his villains from the Grand Guignol section of Central Casting and the varied ranks of the book’s malefactors range from the physically and morally repellent to those clothed in an ominously sinister detachment.  Briefly, to avoid issuing a spoiler alert, the plot hinges on our two protagonists’ investigation of the murder of two teenage girls whose backstories differentiate them from the prostitutes and drug addicts who constitute the rest of this file.  This takes them on a Dante-esque journey through circles of evil and the bodies pile up with the dispensing of contrapassi   The pace of the tale markedly quickens in the violent, detailed recounting of the action sequences.  Notoriously, the Ku Klux Klan wore white bed sheets to symbolise the ghosts of the Confederate dead whom they believed  rode with them and the author draws from this well of eccentric Southern spirituality as the ghost world seems to summon Robicheaux when, in  moments of danger, he feels seduced by the quasi-suicidal hallucination of a 19th century Mississippi paddle steamer complete with Southern belles and ship’s officers on deck, an audible orchestra and an insistent ship’s horn, all drawing him to submit to crossing over to a nether world.  The title The Glass Rainbow echoes two instances in the book where a character comments on the transformative effect of viewing people in light which has passed through stained glass and conceivably, by extension, how our judgement on someone can be influenced by the filter we use on the lens through which we view them.  This would apply to the spectrum of characters from the atypical murder victims to the socially prominent but deceptive villains.   

Some of Burke’s descriptive writing verges on the lyrical, inviting comparisons with Le Carré raising the spy thriller to an art form and the text is liberally sprinkled with intermittently perceptive, introspective philosophising.  This and his tendency to luxuriate in verbal and physical violence makes for an increasingly tenuous relationship with the plot lines.  It is almost as if his Muse has been transformed into a literary Frankenstein’s Monster careering round the script and inserting characters and incidents purely as vehicles to display the author’s virtuosity.  More stringent editing could have made this more than the decent read that it is, leaving this reader to ponder if Burke’s literary canon should be added to the South’s Lost Cause myth.    

A Short Treatise on Mortality, by Douglas Reid Skinner: An Appreciation by Stephen Wrigley

 

In “A Short Treatise on Mortality”, the eighth poetry collection by the South African Douglas Reid Skinner, the reader will discover many interesting, arresting, enjoyable and also challenging poems. Published by Uhlanga Press in South Africa, the collection is well presented in attractive covers where front and back are generously leafed which allows one to easily keep one’s place when reading through. The cover photo artwork of a peopled coastal scene by Revel J Fox is appropriate and to me, evocative of a South African shoreline.

44 poems feature, divided into three sections - Poetry, After and Sunday. Amongst them are a villanelle, four sonnet length poems and a small number of rhyming ones. Doug writes mainly in four line verse form, in an iambic voice and his poems rarely exceed 40 lines: regarding the latter, are modern poets influenced, I wonder, by current poetry competition line limitations, or a production acceptability by poetry magazine editors, one of whom is the author himself who edits Stanzas, a prominent SA poetry mag?

Throughout Doug writes most coherently and accessibly and is a master, it seems to me, of poetic techniques - simile, metaphor, alliteration and, as I have noticed in his earlier books, the effective use of repetition, for example here in Two Minutes where he repeats the first and last verses –

 

We tend to think about things

on the limited scale of our lives,

which are not much more than hamlets

in the wide and dark landscapes of time

 

which comes over as an early indication of the book’s tone. He also has a layout technique of presenting a poem’s last line separately, for emphasis I think, and in this book uses it eleven times: a fond habit.

Although not always commented on in poetry reviews, the titles of poems the author uses here are both effective and challenging; I had to look up Bricolages (def - something constructed or created from a diverse range of things) but it worked well for the poem. Also In The Labyrinth (about a medical condition) and Traces (ostensibly and movingly about ploughing with a horse but possibly something much deeper) are other examples of his skill in this aspect. Occasionally, unforced rhymes appear but in this mostly unrhymed verse and from a poet of Doug’s calibre, I would expect that.

In the first section, Poetry, Doug presents the reader with his take on how he handles the poetic impulse, his frustration when it proves elusive, the personal cost involved in writing; after I had read the poems here more closely, I detected (hopefully correctly) that “she” appearing from nowhere in the fifth verse of Two Minutes was/is in fact a Muse; he then refers to her more explicitly in a later poem, same section, An Epistle to T Voss in Sydney, in the seventh verse as “... the language queen.” In that poem, which I really admire, Doug compares the contents of an Australian poetry anthology to “...a great, big busy beehive,” its “...sweetness inside,”

“...the words, each ready to sting

whoever is trying to get at the honey,

each ready to die for the language queen.”

Which does include Douglas, I think.

Other poems in Poetry which I liked were The Placeholder (about a book marker!), again Traces, beautifully written and as I say, probably on two levels, ie learning to plough but also learning to write. Other poem titles accurately introduce the reader to the art of writing - Out of the Blue, Words, Uninvited and Tightrope. It’s all there, what writers experience.

The second section, After, I found to be the challenging part where many of the poems are written to or with reference to particular literary figures - CJ Driver, Elizabeth Bishop, Eugenio Montale, CP Cavafy, Pliny, Geoffrey Hill. Nothing wrong with this, of course, since no doubt they are Doug’s own reference points, but the average reader might not have sufficient knowledge to appreciate the inferences Doug wishes to make. (So go and look them up, I hear him say!) But all at

 

 Winchelsea LitSoc members should have no difficulty recognising Doug’s teasing in A Riposte of Jonty Driver where the latter’s favoured use of iambics is tellingly portrayed as, I guess, a humorous joust between old friends. “Challenging” aside, I did enjoy Ovid in the Cape (a fragment); Ovid, as readers may know, was banished by the Emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea; Doug sympathetically explores that exile, and perhaps knowledgeably too, being like his friend Jonty, a white South African.

Readers may find the third section, Sunday, the most accessible.

Who Now Regards...? is a short, delightful, rhyming poem about small and humble things. The Tool explores archaeological discovery, blunt in its vocabulary - “...killed by a blow from behind.”

In On a Conversation Never Had, tears sprang to my eyes as Douglas talks, possibly, to his mother. Lovely.

Thirty-Four South, Eighteen East” to me, as an ex-mariner, is an excellent title and as the poet refers to in his Notes at the end, the geographical location of Cape Point, SA. VG.

The last poem of this balanced and thought provoking collection is Sunday. Here, at his most conversational - there are four, eight line verses each featuring a first and last line-end rhyme - Doug deploys his considerable skill in the contemplation of, as in the book’s title and first poem, mortality. Here is his skill in line repetition, used twice -

“I’d so much planned for Sunday” and “I’d been before, I knew the way”

and in so doing, talks to the reader in a quiet and intimate way, in a tone we can all relate to “...so much planned” but then he finds he “...cannot stir” and indeed, he recognises that soon he may not at all. The title of the poem is both understated and astute but Douglas ends, believing

“... I must rise into the air

towards the promised recompense,

the saviour’s hands and heaven’s glow.”

Beautiful poetry, a good example of this well compiled collection.

To conclude, it seems to me that Douglas does indeed confront mortality - the condition of being mortal - not just head on as in his first and last poems, but throughout in and by his poetic expression. We live our lives, he writes, often on a tightrope but stuff can indeed come along out of the blue. There will be time to joke with a friend or again, sadly to contemplate a banishment. If one failed to talk to someone whom we loved, then a poem perhaps can offer redemption. If the medium we use to come to terms with mortality is through verse, then there will still be a cost and a price to pay through effort, but occasionally the gift of happenstance occurs. Death came, Doug writes, long ago to early man using a tool, it nods to us in the labyrinth of life, and might even allow the respite that a drug offers. But if you are prepared as Douglas observes, and far more adroitly on the page, to pause awhile and stand in the buffeting wind, then life itself, despite our insignificance, continues and will allow us to sense what is going on; its deep and musical beat keeps on playing.

Stephen Wrigley

Jonty Driver has some copies for sale. Email him on jontydriver@hotmail.com and he'll tell you how to pay (£10 for the book, £2 for p&p)

LOOT: Britain and the Benin Bronzes talk to Winchelsea Literary Society, by Barnaby Phillips, 17 June 2022

Preconditioned by the June heatwave, former BBC West Africa hand Barnaby Phillips revisited the Lit. Soc. with another tale from that corner of the Dark Continent.  On his first visit, his account of the two forgotten West African divisions of Lieutenant-General Slim’s forgotten XIV^th Army, Another Man’s War, had been enthusiastically received.  On this occasion he was to dissect the issues around contentious imperial cultural acquisitions and the practicality and morality of their restitution in his exploration of Britain’s relationship with the Benin Bronzes. 

The Berlin Conference of 1885 effectively fired the starting pistol for European imperialism’s Scramble for Africa.    The British were stripped, spikes on, crouched on their blocks, eyes fixed on the finishing tape and determined to take first place.  Already familiar with the West African littoral from their 18^th century immersion in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, they had more recently been working their way inland along the rivers of present-day Nigeria in search of resources.  In keeping with a 300-year tradition, they set up the Royal Niger Company to co-ordinate the commercial, administrative and military arms of the enterprise.  Some independent kingdoms still survived in Nigeria’s interior and the largest of these was Benin, home of the Edo tribe and ruled by a king or Oba from the centrally located capital, Benin City.  Benin had a long historical heritage and in previous centuries Portuguese and Dutch traders had admired the extensive, sophisticated earthworks of Benin City and the impressive display of the Oba’s processions.  These kingdoms enjoyed significant agency and exported palm oil directly to Liverpool.  Like the Chinese, the former North American colonists and the Germans before them, the Edo found the allure of Britain’s commercial religion of Free Trade easily resistible.  Undeterred, the British, hearing the secret harmonies of some subliminal, imperial waltz, executed their practised dance steps – establishing a Protectorate on the Niger Coast and inducing the Oba to sign a protection treaty.  This did not protect the Oba from complaints by British traders that he was an impediment to their penetration of the interior.  Deliberating on these, the Consular Service in the Protectorate accepted “something must be done”.

The ”something” proved to be one of those quixotic, ultimately inexplicable tragedies destined to exercise colleagues and future historians indefinitely.  In the absence of the Consul General on extended leave in England, his deputy, James Phillips, a 33-year-old product of public school and Cambridge described by contemporaries as “keen”, had decided that the Oba should be removed and had written to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury telling him of his intention to do that.  In what was to transpire as a posthumous reply as far as Phillips was concerned, London vetoed his plan.  Phillips informed the Oba by letter that he was planning to visit and would be coming unarmed, before setting out with 8 other Britons and 240 native bearers.  En route, Phillips received and ignored the Oba’s reply which advised him to postpone the visit for 2 months until after Ague, a religious festival involving human sacrifice. Phillips did send the military band that was accompanying him back to base.  The mission departed by boat from Calabar on the coast, sailed up the Benin River before branching off to a tributary to Ughoton where they disembarked, intending to complete the journey with a day’s march through the jungle to Benin City.  A few hours later they were ambushed by the Edo, armed with flintlock muskets and machetes.  True to Phillips’ word,  the British were unarmed with the revolvers being carried in wooden cases by their African porters. Seven Britons and an undetermined number of porters were killed but two wounded Britons escaped to safety.

When news reached London, a punitive expedition was quickly organised, arriving in the Niger Delta on 9 February, barely 5 weeks after Phillips’s death.  After a 9-day journey through the jungle where they were subject to constant attacks, an advance guard of 540 soldiers and 840 bearers successfully breached the stockade at Benin City and the Edo fled into the bush to escape the withering fire of the British Maxim guns.  Benin City had succumbed for the first time in 1,000 years.  The victorious expeditionary force found themselves in a veritable slaughterhouse.  There were hundreds of recently decapitated native cadavers, possibly Phillips’s porters and prisoners from other tribes, sacrificed to propitiate native gods as the threat of the impending British assault loomed over the Edo.  Some unfortunates seemed to have suffered ritual execution in quasi-crucifixions while other corpses were unsolicited testimonials to the lethal rapid-fire Maxim guns.  Exploring the conquered city, the British uncovered hundreds of “bronze” plaques, ivory carvings and cast metal heads and statues which were distributed among the British officers according to seniority.  Groups posed for photos beside their loot.  The narrative of a city of blood was shaped by the arrival of Illustrated London News correspondent, Henry Seppings Wright, who in the manner of Catch 22’s entrepreneurial Milo Minderbender arrived with a section of Harrod’s Food Hall in his train. He produced a 13-page Benin supplement replete with florid descriptions of a Golgotha of skulls inviting comparison with modern humanitarian interventions.     Some of the bronzes were given to institutions like the British Museum but most were sold to private collectors and foreign museums when they reached England.  The craftsmanship of the works elicited responses ranging from scepticism to frank disbelief that these pieces could be the work of Africans and Portuguese or Arab influences were initially proposed.  It was to be several decades before Africa received due credit.  While Britain was borne along on the high tide of imperialism during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, others had growing anxieties about this cultural pillage.  The Hague Convention of 1899 prohibited it and made no distinction between civilised and uncivilised nations.  Britain was one of the 51 signatories.  These were the first faltering steps on the road to considering restitution. 

Kenneth Murray, a Balliol College drop-out and grandson of the Oxford English Dictionary’s first editor, arrived in Nigeria to teach Art in 1927 and gradually took on the role of first curator of Nigerian culture.  Officially supported by appointments as Surveyor then Director of Antiquities in the 1940s, he set up the Nigerian Museum system and busied himself with attempts to repatriate the bronzes, especially for the new National Museum in Lagos.  As the question of restitution loomed larger in the arena of cultural debate and the glow of imperial greatness dimmed, descendants of members of the 1897 punitive expedition came forward to personally restore bronzes to Nigeria while high profile returns have come from President Macron, Chancellor Merkel, Aberdeen University and Jesus College, Cambridge. Britain’s custodians of culture have temporised with the V&A’s Tristram Hunt waffling about universal museums (in London, of course).  Individual bronzes have sold at auction recently for millions of pounds. 

It must be acknowledged that Nigeria has not helped its case by allowing its state museums to drift into dereliction since independence with many items being stolen and sold on the private market.  Someone who clearly did not get the memo was 1973 head of state General Gowon, the military victor of the Biafran civil war, who presented a restored bronze to Queen Elizabeth on a state visit.  Many Nigerians accept that conservation and presentation of antiquities is expensive, demanding substantial technical and financial resources which their country lacks and reluctantly conclude that the artefacts would be better served abroad. 

Barnaby covered the historical facts and the current debate round the bronzes in a thorough, balanced manner and his audience showed their appreciation in the most tangible way by stepping up in numbers to buy the new paperback edition of his book.

William Doherty

THE FAIR by Gillian Southgate (Winning entry in The Oldie Literary Competition, published in July 2022 issue

 

THE FAIR

Sharp eyed barkers’ weasel faces, painted nags with flowing mane,

Candyfloss and gewgaw hoop-la; girls are at the fair again.

Engines, acrid smells of diesel, new-cut grasses, sneaky drags,

Sour green apples draped in toffee,  goldfish, sad in plastic bags.

Here’s an edge-of danger-feeling; what will the clairvoyant say

When she maps their lives out for them in the booth with the display

Of testimonials from the famous?  (Famous very long ago),

Though her eyes are on the money, still the maidens want to know

What the future’s going to bring them, when the game of life will start;

On a wooden swingboat’s cradle, one of them has drawn a heart.

And the hurdy-gurdy music roars across the coloured lights,

And the boys pose with their rifles, ginger teddies in their sights,

And the girls are dying for their knees to buckle in a kiss.

Sixteen in the nineteen-sixties; even Elvis can’t match this.

Is Style Gendered? Talk to Literary Society, 20 May 2022, by Navaz Batliwalla

 

That apostle of 80s gender agnosticism, Boy George, famously serenaded the chameleon of his ambiguous sexuality :

I’m a man without conviction

I’m a man who doesn’t know

How to sell a contradiction

You come and go,

You come and go. 

At this stage, George O’Dowd had not yet been convicted and was advancing the thesis that his particular brand of gender fluidity was the product of a deterministic Fate, his karma. 

Using a relaxed interview format Lit. Soc. Committee member, Mark Russell, explored, rather than tried to sell, the contradictions imposed by gender stereotyping and the attempts to escape from it in the world of fashion.  His interlocutor and the Lit. Soc.’s guest speaker was his friend and fellow denizen of the fashion world, Navaz Batliwalla.  As Mark teased out Navaz’s biography, we learnt that her earliest fashion memories from her Kensington Market childhood were the Punk images of the late 70s which retained a subconscious hold through the 80s despite the ubiquity of hyperfeminist big hair, make up and shoulder pads (Sue Ellen, J.R. Ewing’s wife in Dallas, anyone?).  Despite a dalliance with 50s American glamour illustrated by her youthful self in Minnie Mouse attire, Navaz confessed to being consistently attracted to the garçon manqué or tomboy look and from there to the androgynous.  When her initial ambition to be a fashion illustrator was thwarted, she sidestepped into fashion writing and pulled off an early coup with the publication of her first photo shoot by The Guardian.  During a 7-year stint as editor of Teenage magazine she branched out into online communication with her Disneyrollergirl blog.  This proved a professional lifeline when her magazine fell victim to the financial crash and closed in 2008.  While the fortunes of magazines declined, bloggers became the rising stars of a world characterised by short attention spans.  The blog, amplified by judiciously manufactured events, sustained her brand and she remained alert to the emergence of niche magazines.  In 2014, capitalising on the catalogue of images and ideas on her Pinterest (a digital pinboard) and having identified an androgynous leaning sub-group lurking behind the dominant hyperfeminist look, she graduated into books.  The New Garçonne extolled the Gentlewoman style, a soft-focus masculine feminism which rejected prettiness and male gaze femininity.  With a smile, our speaker recounted the clash between her artistic liberty and the unyielding imposition of commercial discipline in the march to publication; number of pages, costs, pricing, photo faces to be unrecognisable.  To her surprise, the last demand gave the photos a pleasingly timeless quality.  Now battle-hardened, Batliwalla authored a second book, Face Values, which brought new beauty rituals and skin care secrets into our ken.  She was encouraged to bring male subjects into this work and break with a tradition of couching beauty in exclusively feminine language. 

The interview proceeded to address duality and the interweaving of the masculine and the feminine with Navaz adducing the example of the pop star, Harry Styles, formerly of the highly commercial boy band, One Direction, who, in his flamboyant way, has become the poster child of genderless dressing.  Tossing some red meat in the direction of the Court Hall audience, the main course in this food for thought repast, Navaz invited us to consider if we are heading for the metaverse years, alluding to the immersive digital future of the internet.  Here we learnt that we could all have an avatar – a 3-legged dog, ourselves as a member of the opposite sex or whatever – which we could dress digitally (with no adverse environmental impact!).  The mirage of a 4^th Industrial Revolution blurring distinctions between digital and physical worlds shimmered before us, the internet of things! 

Our guest discussed some studies from the field of Psychology showing subjects’ conduct could be altered by clothes associated with specific behaviours e.g., lab. coats or military uniforms which segued neatly into clothes empowering the wearer and the idea that you are what you wear.  On the other hand, some deem clothes oppressive - women’s corsets and high heels or men’s suits and ties.  Navaz prophesied change in the previously acutely gendered world of couture, citing again the gender-fluid Harry Styles and his new line of nail varnish for men and the prominence of Lipstick Brother in the expanding Chinese male cosmetics market.

In a lively Q&A, the Winchelsea audience demonstrated an enthusiastic engagement with the avant-garde topics presented although the closing slide of David Beckham in a sarong may have left the odd traditionalist uncertain as to his ability to embrace this version of the future.

William Doherty

Comment on above by Shirley Meyer:

This is a brilliant review of what was an interesting talk in an often “hard-to pull-off” format.

Obviously, a bit nervous at the start, the couple quickly relaxed and the interview became quite conversational. It was engaging, as it covered many aspects of my own youth, searching for my identity and then seeing my own daughters grow up and go through a similar process in an era when hints at gender fluidity, through tailoring, has become, and, is now, much more acceptable. The women’s trouser suits of the 1960’s and 70’s were not the same thing, in my view, but were more of a statement about emancipation and equality, rather than androgeneity.

My only regret is that Navaz Batliwallah had no copies of her books for sale!

Three Poems by Stephen Wrigley

Gull

A bird stands in the field, a gull.

He comes most days, to the same spot, 

central, white on green. I wonder

why he visits. Peace? Surely not,

gulls are gregarious. Perhaps 

he’s staking out a nesting site,

but on a field, in view, exposed, 

vulnerable from any height?

There must be something else. Cast out 

from the colony, penance calls.

He’s lost a mate and comes to mourn. 

Wanderlust - is this where it stalls?

I wish him well, even envy

his space, above, that arch of sky,

and when he’s done with thought and rest, 

his languid skill to lift off. Fly.

Gull Again

Gull has returned, same field, same spot, 

may have a mate, each white on green. 

Head raised, a cautious circling starts

as beak to breast he bobs and preens.

Potential nest? It’s too exposed 

although an all round view exists. 

I'm unconvinced: marauding fox 

or Mr Brock would not desist.

So, courtship wins? A handy patch

to strut and bow, advance his case? 

One could do worse than step the dance 

upon this grassy private space.

I pause to write. But, raise my eyes, 

the birds have flown, the field is clear. 

Like snow, their visit was a gift,

fresh at December’s end of year.

Buzzard, Gull

Buzzard comes visiting the field, 

imposing presence, squat and dark. 

Feathered, his flanks top armoured feet, 

the trappings of an oligarch.

Northward lies his wooded stronghold: 

is he beating boundary lines?

With such a high ungainly step,

that may not be the task in mind.

But wait! From nowhere, Gull appears,

a raucous diving mobster bird.

He harries Buzzard from his patch 

despite a foe hook-beaked and spurred.

Chance passing flight? The world of air 

has hidden corridors, it seems.

There, raptors ride but lookouts guard 

the limits of perceived regimes.

Stephen Wrigley 

“Gulls” and “Gulls Again” appeared in the magazine “Stanzas” in 2020